Protection
Tubes, posts and cages
This is the least glamorous part of the order and the part that decides whether your trees are alive in five years.
Standard
Tree tube + stake
A 5 foot ventilated tree tube on a solid stake. Four jobs at once: it stops deer browse and antler rub, it creates a greenhouse effect that pushes fast early height growth, it lets you spray herbicide around the trunk without hurting the tree, and it makes your seedlings findable in chest-high grass.
Use for: timber ground, CRP, food plots, hunting properties, yards. Anywhere without livestock.
Livestock grade
T-post + welded wire cage
A steel T-post driven deep with a welded wire cage wrapped around it, sized wide enough that an animal cannot reach over and browse the leader. Cattle rub, lean and push. A standard tube-and-stake setup does not survive contact with a cow.
Use for: active pasture, rotational grazing, silvopasture, anywhere livestock can reach.
Why unprotected seedlings fail
- Browse. Deer clip the growing tip. The tree forks, stalls, and gets clipped again next year. Repeat for three years and you have a shrub instead of a tree.
- Rub. A young trunk is exactly the diameter a rutting buck wants. One night of rubbing girdles the tree and kills it.
- Herbicide damage. Without a tube you cannot safely spray the grass circle that the tree needs, so either the grass wins or the spray does.
- Mowing and disappearance. Untubed seedlings vanish into tall grass and get mowed, sprayed or driven over. This happens more often than anyone admits.
- Rodents. Voles girdle trunks under snow cover. A tube seated properly at ground level helps.
Maintenance
Walk your planting every spring. Straighten leaning tubes, re-seat any that have worked up out of the soil, tighten or replace damaged cages, and re-clear the weed circle. Remove tubes once the trunk has filled the tube and the tree is well above browse height, usually somewhere around year three to five. Leaving a tube on too long can constrict the trunk and create a weak, spindly stem that has never learned to stand up in wind.
Already have your own supplies? No problem. We will happily plant trees using tubes, posts and cages you supply. Just say so on the quote form.
Add protection to your order
Tell us whether livestock have access and we'll quote the right tier.